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Journalism of Courage
The Human Resource Development Ministry has proposed to its premier think-tank body, the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), to undertake a survey of higher educational institutions, similar to the exercise on primary schools.
The new Higher Education Secretary, R P Agrawal, has suggested to the NUEPA, now headed by his predecessor and adviser to the HRD ministry, Chancellor Sudeep Banerjee, to undertake a survey on the lines of the District School Information System. Popularly acronymed as DISE in HRD ministry, the system enables collection of data from each and every school in the primary sector in the country. The data collected from these schools range from per centage of SC, ST students to number of teachers, number of classrooms, toilets, library blocks, enrolment percentages, and also gender-wise distribution of students in each class.
HRD minister Arjun Singh had this year introduced two new categories for data collection—that of OBCs and Muslims—in September and October respectively.
The ministry’s new proposal to do a similar survey is expected to get data on similar lines from secondary schools and higher education institutions. This assumes significance in the backdrop of reservations for OBCs in the higher education institutions, and a similar demand for muslims in educational institutions, in general.
Sources said NUEPA, which got the deemed university status in August this year, has taken note of this proposal from the Higher Education Secretary and will be discussing the matter with the ministry, before embarking on the ambitious exercise.
“The implementation of DISE took years to formalise and also needs immense responsibility and infrastructure. The states are also expected to cooperate, down to the district level. Such a large-scale data collection will also require huge manpower. Modalities have to be worked out in detail and systems have to be in place, before taking up this exercise,” said a NUEPA official.
